Analysis as Multiplicity

Analysis as Multiplicity

Author

Stover, Christopher

Published

2013

Journal Title

Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy

Version

Version of Record (VoR)

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© 2013 Appalachian State University. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance withthe copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to thedefinitive, published version.

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Link to published version

https://jmtp.appstate.edu/analysis-multiplicity

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https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au

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AnAlysis As Multiplicity

Analysis as Multiplicity

By Chris stover

When we think about analyzing a piece of music, we should always be prepared to think about what kind of an activity

analysis is, what it intends to do for us, and what the appropriate means are for carrying it out.1 An important goal is to enrich our perspective of what is possible within the context of the music: this is true whether we are coming from the standpoint of listeners, composers, interpreters, or improvisers. We should step back, too, and consider seriously how a creative reading of a musical work transcends the notes themselves to account for things like historical contexts and the range of previous performance practices that have affected subsequent interpretation. At the same time, we might strive to consider equally seriously the kinds of analytic methodologies that have been brought to bear on the music, and how those methodologies have worked both to illuminate various aspects of the music’s structure and possibly to foreclose alternative readings; that is, to limit how we might interpret the music.

When we analyze music as improvisers—shifting our focus from interpretive to productive orientations—these kinds of considerations can become even more pronounced. In the following essay, I will focus on improvisation from two perspectives. First, the work-for-improvisation; that is, describing the multiple scores, historical performances, performance practices, and so on that interconnect to form something like a “text” from which to begin. And second, the act of improvising itself, involving a free play of methodological orientation as it might unfold in the classroom. Ultimately, we will attempt something of a synthesis of the two, creatively inventing new orientations; in other words, we will imagine a multiplicity of investigative readings that coexist and

1 When I think of the types of questions that emerge from this particular productive starting place, I frequently return to the lively discussions that emerged in Betsy Marvin’s “Writing Music Theory” course at Eastman in the mid-1990s. In addition to her important, influential, and impassioned work as a pedagogue and cognitive theorist, Professor Marvin brilliantly reinforces the importance of clarity of thought, compelling rhetoric, and analytical approaches that bring together rigor and imaginative reading. Many warm thanks are due for the invitation to write this article.

JOuRnAl OF Music tHEORy pEDAGOGy

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enrich one another.2 The endpoint of this investigation is an analytic approach that is intended to open a range of ways that we might begin to creatively define the analyzed object. The goal here is not so much to open an experiential field by bracketing out the known in search of increasingly novel “solutions” as to point toward a solution in which multiple correct readings question, challenge, and enrich one another. Another way to think of this is that we are going to approach analysis by considering a range of knowns, following our individual experiences of prior analytic forays, but to continually acknowledge and then bracket out those knowns in the pursuit of further information and further creative readings.

Our thesis, then, begins with a two-part question: for an improvising musician, what is the improvisational object; and how might one engage that object as and how it presents itself?3 In order to engage these questions, I will examine Victor Schertzinger and Johnny Mercer’s 1941 song “I Remember You,” which, like many contemporaneous songs has taken on a rich and varied life as a jazz standard. The following reading of “I Remember You” will consider multiple texts—the fake book “lead sheet” most known to jazz musicians, the published piano sheet music, the original recording by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra featuring Bob Eberly, and seminal jazz recordings by Charlie Parker, Lee Konitz, and Dave Brubeck—focusing on how all of these interrelate with one another to contribute to our multiplicity. In this way we will be

2 “Multiplicity” is here meant as a construct in which the individuality of each reading contributes dynamically to the plural identity of the work that we’re interpreting. While it is not crucial to an understanding of the following study to know this, much of my line of thought is indebted to the philosophical orientation of Gilles Deleuze, and in particular the way that Deleuze playfully, but powerfully, replaces identity (“is”) with multiplicity (“and…and…and…”) as one of the fundamental aspects of a philosophy that foregrounds qualitative difference as prior to, and frankly more interesting than, sameness. The interested reader might refer to Deleuze, Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition as valuable entry-points into Deleuze’s way of thinking.

3 Throughout this essay I will use “object” in a particular sense: as a thing that is itself in a constant state of change. This refers both to what we might call its existential qualities, as a living thing whose identity is best described in terms of flux (this is Deleuze’s difference-as-identity), and from the perspective of the observer: the change that results from bringing new phenomenological or methodological perspectives to bear on the object.

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able to open up a rather large horizon of methodological vantage points without necessarily concerning ourselves with the way that methodological identity limits behavioral possibilities of the music under examination. For example, in order to engage chord/scale theory and its one-to-one correspondences between seven-note chords and the scales that map onto them, we should accept its insistence on “avoid notes” and the ways that it flattens harmonic function and voice-leading behaviors.4 But we might also recast such insistence as strategic and situational in order to consider a radical reading of chord/scale theory that does take such behaviors into account.5 Likewise, we will point toward a methodological model that will draw upon Schenkerian theory, but that subtly extends aspects of that theory to reflect a musical syntax that differs in significant ways from those of earlier tonal processes. Eventually a reading of consonance and dissonance will emerge from some of the details of how the music communicates its essence to us; this will be described in terms of a contingent and “tune-specific” notion of consonance and dissonance.

So let us begin our investigation, with the intention of discovering the identity-as-multiplicity of a piece of music. “I Remember You” has become a canonical jazz standard, with hundreds of documented recordings and a staple at jam sessions. One version

4 The concept of “avoid notes” emerged in jazz pedagogy as something of a workaround for advocates of chord/scale theory. In short, it recasts expressive dissonant notes like the fourth degree of the major (Ionian) scale as a note to be avoided when improvising using that chord/scale (that is, Major Seventh / Ionian). For a nice description of the discursive complication, to say nothing of the highly troubling syntactic implications of this frame of thinking, see Treseler, the living Jazz tradition.

5 Some key pedagogical texts on chord/scale theory include Aebersold, How to play Jazz and improvise and the ii-V7-i progression, Baker, How to play Bebop, vol. 1-3, Haerle, the Jazz language: A theory text for Jazz composition and improvisation, and Levine, the Jazz theory Book. Much of this work draws upon and extends John Mehegan’s first forays into chord/scale mappings (Mehegan, Jazz improvisation Vol. 1: tonal and Rhythmic principles), the significance of which Henry Martin describes in his summary of the state of jazz theory (Martin, “Jazz Theory: An Overview”). For critiques of some of the foundational principles of chord/scale theory see Rawlins, “Review of Mark Levine, the Jazz theory Book” and Stover, “Theory, Pedagogy, and the Ethics of Chord/Scale Isomorphism: Toward a Minor Literature of Modern Jazz Practice.”


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that is particularly well-known in the jazz community is Charlie Parker’s 1954 quartet recording for Clef Records, with Al Haig on piano, Percy Heath on bass, and Max Roach on drums, an excerpt of which can be heard at www.morezero.com/parker_head.mp3. We might constructively compare Parker’s version with the original 1941 recording by Bob Eberly and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, which can be heard at www.morezero.com/dorsey.mp3, to begin to get a sense of the song’s interpretive range.6

After listening to these versions, and a few others, I would encourage my students to begin by drawing upon their analytic (or simply observational) experience. This turns out to be a rather more complex question than first assumed. After all, the Broadway show tunes and motion picture hits from the first half of the twentieth century, many of which comprise the large repertoire known collectively as the Great American Songbook, were not written to be improvised on, at least in the sense that jazz musicians generally intend, as vehicles for extended extemporization. But of course over subsequent decades there has been a vast and richly differentiated legacy of jazz musicians doing exactly that, using these songs as launching points for all kinds of idiomatic, even idiosyncratic, exploration, drawing upon not only the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and formal elements of the tune itself but on layers of overlapping and occasionally contradictory ways of conceiving of the improvisational object that define some of those very idioms and allow for some of those idiosyncracies. Bruce Ellis Benson succinctly describes this plural way of thinking: “the ‘structures’ that we call pieces of music are ‘composed’ of the activity of music making itself, rather than music making ‘plus some other thing’ (that we would call a ‘work’)”; in other words, the original activity of composing that results in the score interpenetrates with layers of interpretive activity, all of which conspire to form the musical “structure.”7

6 Dorsey’s recording dates from December 1941, just a few weeks before the January 1942 release of the motion picture the Fleet’s in, for which it was written. The seamless way that Eberly links the verse of the tune—not discussed in this brief exposition due to space constraints and the fact that with a few notable exceptions jazz musicians tend to set aside the verses of the tunes they play—with the refrain is among the many lovely aspects of this recording.

7 Benson, the improvisation of Musical Dialogue, 161. The overlapping and occasionally contradictory engagement refers in part to the

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So an entry into the improvisatory potential of a tune like “I Remember You” should address a wide range of analytic and experiential vantage points, and should be prepared to bring them into dialogue in some way, whatever that may end up meaning. Again, just to have some kind of a common starting point, I would ask a group of students to begin by bringing the knowledge of their immediately reachable analytic experience to bear, and to withhold judgment about what is correct or better or real “until all the evidence (or at least sufficient evidence) is in.”8 With every group of students that I have taken through this project, the same quite interesting result occurred, which was that students began first to address issues of harmonic function in one of two ways (and the second of the two followed closely): either to focus on scalar collections that might be applied unproblematically to the harmonic progression of the tune, or to identify surface-level local tonal areas in terms of “II-Vs” and similar chunks of tonal information. In other words, we might first proceed into something like that shown in either Figure 1, which foregrounds clear and relatively unmarked chord/scale relations, or Figure 2, which begins to chunk surface-level tonal progressions, and the second approach would follow close behind. Or perhaps something like Figure 3, which begins to engage some strategic decisions about what scale might comparably represent both a local tonal area being traversed and its relation to the global key (marking the chord/scale relations, in other words). The annotation in Figure 3 reflects how careful prescriptive attention is given to behaviors that stem from the chords and local tonal areas, as well as how those chords and local tonal spaces compose out the global key (which in turn will eventually point to some of the larger-scale voice-leading considerations discussed below).

application of (modal-based) chord/scale theory to tonal processes, which is addressed briefly below and in more detail in Stover, “Theory, Pedagogy, and the Ethics of Chord/Scale Isomorphism.”

8 Ihde, Experimental phenomenology, 36.


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Figure 1. “Literal” Chord/Scale Reading.

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Figure 2. Tonal Harmonic Analysis.


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Figure 3. “Tonal” Chord/Scale Reading.

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We might think of the first chord/scale stratum from Figure 3 as a fairly straightforward, mundane reading (following that from Figure 1), and the second stratum as one that engages tonal areas a bit more thoughtfully, making strategic decisions based on the local functional relation of sonic events to one another. While the second stratum builds upon the first, we might take extra care here to resist thinking of it as a refinement or improvement—this in the interest of imagining as wide a range of “correct” answers as we can—and we should continue to think of all of these readings in terms of what value they might potentially bring to our emerging understanding. In other words, and as we will see playing out in practice below, both strata (and more) co-exist and can serve as potential paths through the harmonic framework of the tune.

Following this array of “correct” answers, we can investigate a plural solution that allows for multiple paths through the tune’s harmonic framework, with multiple scale options that might be applied to particular chords or pairs of chords (especially II-Vs), based on context, and that also addresses some fundamental voice-leading considerations that arise from harmonic function. Figure 4 shows one such path through the form, synthesizing our first and strategically chosen strata from our third examples. Note how the chord/scale interpretation culls variously from the two strata in Figure 3; there were specific musically-inspired reasons for these decisions, some of which we will return to below. The important thing to reinforce is that as we examine each reading, we then bracket it out to the best of our ability, as a viable reading to which we’ll return.

At this point in the process it might be useful to offer an admonition from Ornette Coleman about focusing overly on the harmonic progression of a tune: “let’s play the music and not its background!”9 Coleman was concerned about the seemingly-exclusive emphasis by contemporaneous improvisers on a tune’s harmonic framework, and thus by the dismissal of a tune’s arguably most salient feature, its melody. While Henry Martin has convincingly argued that at the highest levels this is not entirely true, Coleman’s point is well taken.10 And as the student responses

9 First cited by Martin Williams in the liner notes to Coleman, Free Jazz. 10 See Martin, charlie parker and thematic improvisation and “Charlie

Parker and ‘Honeysuckle Rose’: Voice Leading, Formula, and Motive” for compelling readings of Parker’s improvisations that focus on melodic development and its relation to deep structure. See also Hermann,


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Figure 4. One Pass at Synthesizing Tonal Analysis and Chord/Scale Reading.

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described above suggest, the melody is certainly not the first aspect of a tune that aspiring jazz musicians tend to focus on, nor is it a cornerstone of modern pedagogical practice.11

So I might ask a class at this juncture, what about the melody? What do you find about the melody of “I Remember You” that is compelling to you as an improviser? And again, what does “compelling” mean from a productive standpoint, and what might you do with those compelling features? An annotated lead sheet, based on the version well known to jazz musicians from the Real Book, is shown in Figure 5. Thinking in terms of what jazz musicians say they privilege we might ask what the most distinctive components are that telegraph the identity of the tune to the listener, and about the lyrics, which virtually every jazz musician claims as a fundamental beginning point. We might notice the opening gesture, a weak-beat upper neighbor ornamenting a consonant third, and the subsequent role that upper neighbors play as the tune unfolds. We might notice the middleground chromatic descent of the “A” section (described below). We might notice the way that repetition abets motivic development: the opening motif (marked “M1” in Figure 5) repeats, but is chromatically inflected in order to propel the second iteration all the way to the end of measure eight. Then we might consider how when the opening motif returns in the bridge it itself is prolonged for four measures to effect the modulation to VI. Indeed, just about all of the motivic activity in “I Remember You” can easily be shown to emerge from that opening gesture. The way that motivic continuity is employed to aid the transition between third-related harmonic spaces will play out in compelling ways in the middleground analysis below.

Following another stream of modern jazz improvisational practice, we might consider some of the characteristic motivic features of “I Remember You” in terms of their potential for development: how might we transpose, invert, retrograde,

“Charlie Parker’s Solo to ‘Ornithology’: Facets of Counterpoint, Analysis, and Pedagogy,” Larson, “The Art of Charlie Parker’s Rhetoric,” Love, “‘Possible Paths’: Schemata of Phrasing and Melody in Charlie Parker’s Blues,” and Strunk, “Bebop Melodic Lines: Tonal Characteristics” for further evidence from different analytic perspectives.

11 I provide evidence for the nearly-exclusive focus on chords and chord/scale mappings in several of the most popular jazz theory and improvisational method books in Stover, “Theory, Pedagogy, and the Ethics of Chord/Scale Isomorphism.”


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Figure 5. Some Distinctive Motivic Features.

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truncate, expand, elide, concatenate, or otherwise manipulate a motif? How might those transformations then be employed in an improvisation that itself attends carefully to the tune’s harmonic progression? Or might we imagine one that recasts the tune in any of an infinite range of imaginative ways, including the invention of new developmental processes?12

Likewise, the lyrics for “I Remember You” suggest compelling interpretive possibilities, from standpoints of motivic development and phrase structure. The sentiments of the song’s lyrics are charming and nostalgic in the manner of many World War II-era popular songs, and there is value in mentioning that lyricist Johnny Mercer acknowledges its mildly scandalous origins, describing how he wrote it specifically “for Judy Garland. I always had such a crush on Garland that I couldn’t think straight, so I wrote this song.”13 Perhaps more clearly germane for the present account, though, is the way in which the prosody of the lyrics shapes the extensions and compressions of motivic material, which turns out to be crucial for the particular path through which the song’s phrase structure unfolds. Figure 6 illustrates how prosody and rhyme generate intricate phrase relations from expansions of the initial motif. Here the opening line “I remember you” is followed by the parallel, rhyming phrase “you’re the one who made my dreams come true,” adding four syllables to the initial statement. The melodic line of the second phrase begins parallel to the first, taking the melody down from E to Eb, and the extra four syllables enact the “pseudo-sequential” action described in Figure 5 above. There are thus at least two antecedent–consequent relations to attend to: the parallelism of the two five-note motifs ending on 7 and b7 respectively, and the extension of the second phrase that follows the lyrics’ rhyme scheme. We might also notice that the “ago” that ends the first eight-measure unit finds its rhymed counterpart eight measures later, reinforcing the structural significance of 5, which will be described shortly. But à propos of the initial motif, we see the temporally displaced rhyme of measure five pushed an additional

12 While several published method books describe melodic manipulation and development (see Liebman, A chromatic Approach to Jazz Harmony and Melody, 45–52, for one compelling exposition), sources that consider how to develop melodic and motivic ideas derived from the tune being played are frustratingly rare. We will see one particularly clear example of motivic manipulation when we investigate Brubeck’s improvised solo below.

13 Cited in Furia, skylark: the life and times of Johnny Mercer, 131.


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Figure 6. Role of Prosody and Rhyme in Development of Phrase Structure.

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two measures back in the bridge; this second displacement is itself enacted by the addition of a new internal rhyme on “bell” and “fell.” Finally, in the last A section the consequent rhyme is displaced further, to the eleventh measure, this time abetted by the internal rhyme of “recall” and “all.” It is no stretch to suggest that the way Mercer elongates his phrases through displaced rhymes necessitates the unusual 36-measure structure of the song.

Up to this point we have considered issues of harmonic identity, chord/scale relations, motivic identity, and the fluid phrase structure suggested by the prosody of the lyrics. I would next ask students to consider some elements of deeper structure and process, which generally involves more hand-holding than some of the directions we’ve explored thus far, but which rewards the time spent, especially as we begin to synthesize all of these different vantage points into the multiplicity alluded to above, in which all blend into and inform one another.

“I Remember You”’s opening melodic gesture rises from 7 to 1 over tonic harmony. That semitone motion is mirrored in the first harmonic action—FMaj7 moving down to E7 as the continuation of the II-V motion of measure two; note that in the sheet music version (and in the Jimmy Dorsey recording) there is no pre-dominant chord in this measure—we should take this under consideration as we occasionally elide II-Vs into single harmonic objects.14 We can think of this opening melodic gesture from at least two structural perspectives: 7 as a lower neighbor to a structurally prior 1 on beat two, or 1 as an incomplete upper neighbor to 7. As Figure 7 illustrates, the first reading opens up an interesting long-range process through the first eight measure of the tune; 1 enacting a descending chromatic line to 5 in measure seven.

14 In the 1941 sheet music (which is in the key of G), the second measure is an F# chord, but with G in the bass as a pedal point linking measures one and three—we’ll see below that this reinforces some basic claims that are being made here about structural parallelisms and composings-out of melodic gestures.


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Figure 7. Two Interpretations of Voice Leading in the First Eight-Bar Phrase.

Figure 7B, conversely, reveals a compelling chromatic descent to 5 that begins on 7, with its incomplete upper neighbor and filled-in lower third (a more detailed reading might question whether this third actually suggests an inner voice or compound melody—we’ll return to this consideration in the analysis of Lee Konitz’s solo below), repeats on b7 (reiterating the upper neighbor gesture) as it passes to 6 supporting pre-dominant harmony, then to b6 with one more upper neighbor to take us to 5. As described in the account of motivic structure in Figure 7, a great deal of melodic action is generated from the melodic figuration of the first measure, and especially from the structural status of the opening dyad. An interesting conundrum results from this reading, however. If structural and surface melodic action are generated from 7 and its dependent upper neighbor, then it seems we are making a case for 7 over tonic harmony to be a consonant structural note, and 1 (tonic, as well as the root of the chord) to be an expressive dissonance. This reinforces a point about the particular kinds of tonal behaviors that occur in the music of the Great American Songbook and jazz standards, which is that, unlike a great deal of the tonal music that preceded and informed it, chordal sevenths are pervasive and very often structurally consonant, even on tonic chords.15 This is a

15 Schenker recognized numerous situations in which the seventh of a V7 chord would be prolonged by an upper-neighbor root. An alternate

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point that cannot be reinforced enough; indeed, I would argue that many theorists who have been using Schenkerian methodologies to describe jazz practice are doing some small amount of harm to the music by insisting on reducing sevenths to diminutions of more fundamental triadic structures, rather than allowing them to behave as structurally consonant and process-generating chord tones, such as that shown in the opening of “I Remember You.”16

Considering 7 as a generator of middleground structure also supports the reading of the bridge to “I Remember You” shown in Figure 8, in which 3 supports a IVMaj7 chord (again with its dependent incomplete upper neighbor), which descends through 2 to #1 supporting VIMaj7 in a lovely unfolding of pre-dominant harmony (IV transformed into VI through 5-6 technique), then to 1 through mode mixture and ultimately to 7 and the dominant interruption.

There are a few more features of harmonic relationships in “I Remember You” that Figure 8 makes clear. First, recall again how the opening melodic gesture is repeated in the key of the

reading of the present narrative therefore might be one that extrapolates such behavior over tonic harmony, following a free contrapuntal framework that begins with seventh chords as syntactically consonant, whether in tonic, pre-dominant, or dominant contexts.

16 Mark McFarland offers an excellent synopsis of a schism in the jazz scholarly community, between those that insist on a more conventional Schenkerian approach and those that lean toward recasting Schenkerian principles in terms of a hybrid syntax in which sevenths are consonant and that allows for a (slightly) larger number of fundamental lines to serve as background structures. See McFarland, “Schenker and the Tonal Jazz Repertory: A Response to Martin.”

Figure 8. Voice Leading in the Bridge, Following Figure 7B.


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subdominant. Here the harmonic motion projected from the bass—which originally played out as a lower neighbor returning to tonic, 1 to 7, with the latter’s dependent upper fifth, and back to 1—is recast as V in the key of the major submediant. As Figure 9 suggests, the resolution-drive of measure two is denied, only to be realized in measure eighteen; in other words, the II-V in A of measure two moves deceptively to its bVI, while the analogous action in measure eighteen completes the harmonic motion to the local tonic. Note that the choice here to read the motion from measure two to three as deceptive within the local context of the II-V in A is intended to be construed alongside our earlier reading, in which measure two prolongs a bass lower neighbor. Also note how this additional interpretation influences the chord/scale decision shown in Figure 4; if we think of measure two as an unresolved (or deceptively resolved) II-V that will eventually be substantiated in the bridge, then a chord/scale reading that emphasizes its local major-key II-V-ness will reinforce that interpretation.

Such a pluralist reading of elaboration and functional implication becomes a much more important consideration when we zoom out to examine still larger-scale voice-leading connections. The reading shown in Figure 10 suggests that the dramatic octave displacement of the final “A” section, which transfers 5 to the higher octave, in order to enact a quick but greatly delayed five-line descent, is the result of a reaching-over in which the middle voice 5 is revealed as an important—the most important—structural generator. What this does to our earlier reading of 7 is it recharacterizes it as an upper-third elaboration of 5; in other words, we’re now reconsidering 7 as

Figure 9. Non-Fulfillment and Fulfillment of Resolution Impulse.

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closer to a surface-level phenomenon. What I would like to reinforce here, however, just like the dual reading of measure two in Figure 9 suggests, is that these two readings operate at roughly equivalent strata; that the nearer-to-surface level is not subordinate to the longer-range level. This is what Deleuze would call a rhizomatic reading rather than a more traditional tree structure, and it suggests that we can choose to focus on one reading or the other, depending on our productive needs as improvisers. It is also one of the many reasons that I been driving toward conceptual language like multiplicities and pluralities: not just the way that this particular analytic project is being cast fundamentally as a multiplicity, but encouraging the reader to think about existing analytic methodologies in terms of their potential contribution toward reading-as-multiplicity, or toward their potential creative disruption. To this end, we could imagine the further interpretation shown in Figure 11, in which the higher-octave 5 is transferred from the upper-voice 5 that ends the first “A” section (measure seven), which itself is approached via its upper third (and which in turn therefore enacts the series of upper thirds that appear throughout).

Figure 10. A Deeper Middleground Reading of the Entire Tune.

Figure 11. An Additional Interpretive Layer: Displacement of Upper-Voice 5.


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Earlier we set aside a number of chord/scale readings, and now we might begin to think of how to assimilate those readings, which represent various ways of approaching the tune from modern jazz pedagogical perspectives, with a melody-oriented reading that engages motivic development and voice leading. Let’s begin with that last point: what if we consider voice-leading as a larger harmonic phenomenon? For example, the entire harmonic space of measure two could be said to behave as a neighbor chord that links measure one to three, which is itself prolonged by its own upper fifth: II-V as single functional object. Likewise, the way that measure four recasts tonic harmony as V of IV follows suit in a logical manner, preceded by its own dependent pre-dominant, as Figure 12 shows. Here, the beginning of measure two is shown to be structurally dependent on the chord generated from the bass lower neighbor, just as the downbeat of measure four prolongs the transformed version of tonic harmony as it leads to IV. By foregrounding the neighboring action of measure two, we can more closely consider what kind of a chord or chord/scale we wish to engage, as Figure 13 illustrates.

Figure 12. Prolongation of Bass Neighbor Motion.

Figure 13. Influence of Neighbor Motion on Chord-Scale Reading.

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Notice that a strategic decision to add a b9 to the E7 chord has been made; this extends two fundamental aspects of compositional design suggested in the previous measure: neighboring motions as syntactically important, and 1 as melodically dependent on 7. In this case, the reading shown in Figure 13 interprets the II-V of measure two in terms of its potential for common-tone relatedness to tonic via the b9 (diatonic) neighbor note, and similarly the IV chord of measure five as Lydian, reifying its subordinate role in the home key. Now this seems to contradict earlier thoughts about interpreting the II-V of measure two in the key of A; again we have multiple “correct” answers at work here, and I encourage my students (and the reader) to embrace this multiplicity, and to consider seriously its interpretive implications. Furthermore, the interpretation of Figure 13 extends the range of textual orientations to include the current investigation, which is not only very much in the spirit of the kind of multiple reading we are striving for, it is in fact demanded by that kind of reading.

As Joseph Dubiel has written about Schenkerian principles and the particular ways that Schenker characterized them, we should consider the ways in which a melodic gesture can penetrate deeper levels of structure, including how a dissonance might be made consonant by becoming a harmony; in other words, we should be thinking actively about behaviors of notes and their generative potential. Dubiel suggests that “Schenker can use the passing tone as the basis for his entire model of musical coherence precisely because he believes that the effect of ‘being passing’ can never be drowned out,”17 a phenomenon that we can observe of the neighbor notes in the current illustration. In the reading shown in Figure 13, neighbor notes are made consonant as they become neighboring chords, and earlier (Figures 7B and 10), neighboring thirds were shown to function in a similar manner. In fact, thirds-as-neighbors are illustrated at two levels in Figure 7B: at the immediate local level (1 prolonging 6 as a neighboring gesture in measure five), and as nested neighboring figures in measure one (1 prolonging 7, which in turn prolongs 518). Recall that this reading, should we choose to engage it, is supported by the strategic larger-scale reading of Figure 10.

17 Dubiel, “‘When You Are a Beethoven’: Kinds of Rules in Schenker’s ‘Counterpoint’,” 317.

18 (or vice versa!)


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We have now mapped out a multiplicity in which functional harmony, decisions about chord/scale relations, motivic behaviors, lyrics, and large-scale voice-leading connections all interact and enrich one another. All of this activity still engages the tune as a tune; that is, as something much like a fixed text, the details and qualities of which are generated primarily from the lead sheet version most known to jazz musicians, with fleeting references to the original version as represented in the published piano music. As we continue to expand our terrain of experiential and productive possibilities, we should return to our earlier thoughts about historicity, signification, and performance tradition. While we could begin with the Dorsey version we heard above, or with Dorothy Lamour’s performance in the 1942 motion picture the Fleet’s in, it seems more immediately productive to explore how “I Remember You” has been used in the tradition of modern jazz. We will continue, then, by focusing briefly on excerpts from three iconic improvised solos, by Charlie Parker, Lee Konitz, and Dave Brubeck respectively. By doing so we will see how all of these improvisers bring together aspects of their idiosyncratic improvisational proclivities with important structural elements of the tune, and in addition we will be able to observe how the syntax of bebop improvisation is reconfigured through the individual enunciations of each performer. Figure 14 shows a transcription of the second (partial) chorus of Charlie Parker’s improvised solo, from his aforementioned 1954 recording. The excerpt shown in Figure 14 can be heard at www.morezero.com/parker_second_chorus.mp3. At the beginning of this chorus, and then again eight bars later, Parker develops the nested upper neighbors prolonging ^7 that are highlighted in the figure. We should also note the careful way that Parker brings about long-range connection between active tones, which both Henry Martin and Steve Larson have described about other Parker improvisations.19 The E of measures 1-2 moves down to Eb in measure four, which is then transferred up an octave to D in the following measure. The expected descent to Db is then prolonged to take the melody back to the original octave and the resolution to C to complete the third-progression (and which in turn immediately descends an additional third, via passing tone, to a consonant A to begin the next phrase). A similar process unfolds, with an analogous octave transfer, in Parker’s second phrase. We should also note Parker’s choice to interpret measure two as a II-V in A major as described above, deemphasizing that measure’s neighbor-note

19 See footnote 10.

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Figure 14. Charlie Parker Solo, Second (Partial) Chorus(Transcribed by the Author).


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relatedness to measure 1; Parker does this by moving down the A major scale with the chromatic passing tone on the “and” of three that would later be characterized as the major bebop scale.20

In his version of “I Remember You” from a lovely trio performance from seven years later, featuring Sonny Dallas on bass and Elvin Jones on drums, Lee Konitz begins with a paraphrase of the melody that initially omits the 1 second pitch—perhaps giving support to the reading that casts 1 as a dependent upper neighbor. In the fourth chorus of his solo, shown in Figure 15, and which can be heard at www.morezero.com/konitz_fourth_chorus.mp3, Konitz begins with a rising diatonic gesture that prolongs 7 as an upper neighbor, with the initial neighboring 1 itself prolonged by its upper third (marked “N” in the figure, and recalling the third-as-neighbor shown in the Parker example above); here we might also notice how Konitz relocates the inner-voice 5 as a pedal with its own dependent upper neighbor, and also how he inverts the initial third to a sixth in measures 9 and 13. The second of these enables a particularly elegant interaction between the expected chromatic descent from 7 to 5 and the careful octave displacement that prolongs that descent: notice how the 6 that serves as the upper sixth in the initial gesture in measure 13 is recast as an octave-displaced sixth in the lower voice descent, eventually returning to the lower register in measure 16.

20 See Baker, How to play Bebop for one explanation of bebop scales and their melodic and metric derivation.

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Figure 15. Lee Konitz Solo, Fourth Chorus (Transcribed by the Author).


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In a seminal live recording from 1953, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Joe Dodge on bass, and Ron Crotty on drums, Dave Brubeck explores further ways to interface with the melody and harmony of “I Remember You.” Following Desmond’s unsurprisingly coherent and motivically cohesive solo, Brubeck begins his solo with the melodic paraphrase shown in Figure 16, which can be heard at www.morezero.com/brubeck_first_chorus.mp3. Brubeck’s initial omission of the upper neighbor 1, and subsequent replacement of it with an upper third composed out as a pentatonic figure in measure three reinforces 7’s status as a structural note. This status is reaffirmed eight measures later: in the second “A” section Brubeck greatly exaggerates 7 two times with strong dynamic accents, each time followed by a commensurably soft continuation of the melody. In the bridge, he does play the upper neighbor to 3, but it is delayed by several beats and turns out to serve as the generator of the gesture 4–3–2–#1, which eventually repeats twice a whole step lower as the figure b3–2–1–7 to return to the melody at the beginning of the final “A” section. The transformation from 4–3–2–#1 to b3–2–1–7 involves a very striking Gb against a II-V in C (that is, Gb over Dmin7–G7). This supports a reading that suggests that Brubeck is concerned here with motivic coherence, even at the expense of local harmonic fidelity.

In the final “A” section of this chorus, Brubeck continues to explore neighbor motifs. In measure 25 he follows 7’s upper neighbor with #6 as a chromatic lower neighbor. Then starting in measure 28 is a long, expanding flow of chromatically-inflected upper neighbors and pairs of neighbors: beginning with 5–b5–4, immediately recast as 5–b5–4–3 (mm. 30 to 31; suggesting a reinterpretation of 5 as another upper-third-as-neighbor), which then composes out in measures 32 to 33 as a series of chromatic neighbor pairs and diatonic thirds-as-neighbors.

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Figure 16. Dave Brubeck Solo, First Chorus (Transcribed by the Author).


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The jazz performance tradition, and the range of pedagogical models that both describe and inform it, foregrounds close, even mimetic attention to exemplary performers and historical performances. It also foregrounds the internalization of a large number of communally agreed-upon tunes in order to facilitate something of a lingua franca among jazz musicians (albeit one that is open to an infinite range of interpretational lines that leave that common framework to varying degrees). The analytic project described above extends and intensifies how a student of jazz improvisation might address the musical work. On one hand, it suggests an open engagement with the possibilities suggested by this or that chord or chord/scale reading, including strategic reasons why one might choose one reading or another at any given moment. On another hand, it engages the tune’s melody both as a source for creative motivic development and in terms of short- and long-range voice leading connections. It then begins to demonstrate how the fruits of these kinds of decisions, conscious or not, have emerged in the work of exemplary improvising musicians. In a sense we are formalizing a process that many of the greatest jazz musicians—the Miles Davises, the Joe Hendersons, the Bill Evanses, not to mention the Parkers, Konitzes, and Brubecks—have done through their careers; returning time and again to the same tunes, responding to the traditions that preceded them, including their own earlier performances, and constantly finding new phenomenal points of view from which to regard the tune’s melody, harmony, and formal design.

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